Wednesday, December 29, 2010

An overview of some of the sketches I've done over the past few days—vacation time is nice for sketching. That owl will be the last drawing in my 2010 Moleskine planner...**sniff**. On the upside, I've got a 2011 planner filled with blank pages.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Mom requested some bird art as a Christmas gift this year. Several years ago, I had done some pen and ink birds (a series of 6 or 7), and I have a few large prints of them on my office wall. She wasn't specific about which bird, so I did my favorite of the series. As you can see from the photos, the original photo appeared in a magazine ad.

After completing the contour sketch I started to sweat my pen technique (or relative lack thereof), so a scribbled up a rough in my sketchbook. I used a bit of pencil for the shading and decided to run with that on the final art as well—I LOVE my blending tool.

Why a box? Because in my head there was going to be a wonderful watercolor there with a lighting effect that bathed the bird in soft color. Didn't exactly turn out like what I had pictured in my head.

The rose was always part of the plan, but it blocked what I'd planned to be a burnished sunset. It looked a little anemic as just a yellow rose. Considering the final outcome, I should have stopped here...sigh.

Yeah, that's right...blue. It's very blue, isn't it? Really blue, and overpowering the rose. So then the rose needed more color, and then the blue was wimpy. Watercolor out of control.

Finally I put down the paintbrush and stepped away from the paper. Overall, I'm very pleased with the bird. In comparison to the original pen and ink from about 4 years ago, my technique has developed nicely.

While listening to angels sing, I sketched the back of the head of the wife of the pastor who baptized me...didja follow that? Mom and I had meet Rev and Joanne for dinner (delicious!) at Deerfield Italian Kitchen before the performance. I couldn't tell from my angle whether Joanne was feeling the effects of a tasty, sleep-inducing dinner or just reading the program. I'll admit to doing a bit of both during the performance myself—one of the wonderful things about attending a concert is the ability to absorb the beauty of the performance while flitting through multiple states of consciousness.

Luckily, Alan incorporated a one-verse sing-along at the very end of Oh Come, All Ye Faithful (the last programmed song of the evening) to shake us all awake.

In about an hour, I'm going to enjoy my leftover Chicken and Truffle Risotto (no you can't have any, go get your own), but thought I'd share the sketch first.